Word Efficiency
Why Will Maguire’s “Chain Lightning” is magical.
The old folks taught us to pinch pennies. Old editors teach writers to pinch words.
Pinching them well comes slowly, over time. It’s a learned thing. Takes discipline. The ones who excel at it, folks who write so tight you might call them miserly, can do the genuinely magical: create a world of meaning with only a few words, or with just the right word choice.
Take the first sentence of North Carolina novelist David Joy’s 2017 novel The Weight of This World:
Aidan McCall was twelve years old the one time he heard “I love you.”
Thirteen words to conjure a boy who lived the first years of his life under conditions we wouldn’t wish on a dog.
The long-gone Texas songwriter Townes Van Zandt could do magic with the choice of a single word. Take this line from his 1972 song “If I Needed You.”
Lady’s with me now, since I showed her how to lay her lily hand in mine.
In the notebook of any other songwriter before or since, lady would have laid her “little” hand in his. But by turning “lily” into an adjective, your picture of the woman just…well…it just blossoms, pun fully intended.
When I read our lead story this week, “Chain Lightning,” by the Nashville writer Will Maguire, it called to mind mastery such as what I just described. Will’s fictional short story is actually short—not even fourteen-hundred words long. But the truths in it are big. If you’re not gobsmacked by the end of the fourth paragraph, I promise to buy you a biscuit the next time I see you.
Speaking of great writing, our Rob Rushin-Knopf’s Southern Reader’s Travelogue continues this week as he follows the trail of Flannery O’Connor to her childhood home in Savannah, Georgia, to Andalusia, the house where she died in Milledgeville.
We wrap up the week with “Colossal Love,” a set of two poems by New Orleans’ Rhienna Reneé Guedry. I’ll just tease you with one line: “Let’s grow old somewhere we can steal stemware and get away with it.” Lord, yes.
We wish you summertime love from the big old house party called Salvation South. Drink plenty of water. It’s otherworldly, freakishly hot out there. May the words we bring you this week cool you down some.
Chuck Reece is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Salvation South, the weekly web magazine you're reading right now. He was the founding editor of The Bitter Southerner. He grew up in the north Georgia mountains in a little town called Ellijay.